“And that’s how she got pneumonia?”
“Mm-hm. See, she was impatient, and she went out to the reef in February before the sea had warmed up. And then she stayed in too long. Only I figure probably she didn’t realize it, because she was so strung out. She caught a bad chill. But she didn’t like doctors, so by the time she went to one it was too late.”
“And you weren’t here.”
“No. I should have been, but I wasn’t. I shouldn’t have left her alone, the state she was in, but I thought I had to be a good little boy and meet my classes.” Mac almost groaned with sarcasm. “I didn’t even know Lorin was in the hospital till the day before she died. And by the time I got home it was all over.”
“I’m sorry,” Polly murmured, silently apologizing for everything she had thought and said over the last months about Hugh Cameron’s desertion of Lorin.
“That’s okay. It was a long time ago, and, like I said, we hadn’t been getting on all that well.”
Had he said that? Polly thought not, but she didn’t challenge him.
“Only somehow that made it worse, you know?” Mac looked at her. “Hey, Polly,” he said, putting one arm around her shoulders. “You okay?”
“I’m okay,” she said, wondering if it were true. “Well, I guess I feel a little awful. I didn’t know —”
“Nobody told you, huh.”
Polly shook her head. In her mind, Lorin Jones floated facedown in the salty aquamarine water of the Gulf, her long thin legs and arms spread in the shape of a pale star; her dark seaweed hair sloshed in the waves. Below her a school of little pale fish swam through branching coral. Her huge wet star-lashed eyes were wide open behind a snorkeling mask edged with white rubber. They did not blink, though, because she was dead.
What the hell’s the matter with you? Polly scolded herself. Why should you feel like crying? Lorin Jones didn’t drown, she died in the Florida Keys Memorial Hospital. Anyhow, you don’t like her. “It’s stupid, I —” she said. Choking on the last word, she stood up and turned away.
“ ’S okay,” Mac said. He came over to Polly and put his arms around her.
“I didn’t —” She choked up again, recovered. “I mean, I didn’t even know her.” No, an internal voice said, but you’re planning to ruin her reputation, aren’t you? Pretty soon Lorin’s name will be mud, because of the dirt and muck you’re planning to spread on it, out of envy and spite and sexual jealousy. She’ll be dead and disgraced, isn’t that the idea? And you’ll be alive and successful. Isn’t that the idea? A spasm of self-revulsion shook her. Forgive me, she whispered silently to Lorin Jones. I won’t betray you, I won’t hurt you; it was a mistake.
“Sorry. I’m all right now,” she said, blinking.
Mac kissed her lightly, then looked around the raw, empty, darkening house. “Hey, this is sort of a dreary scene,” he said, checking his watch. “I tell you what, let’s get out of here and find ourselves some conch chowder, okay?”
“Okay. But I’d better get back to the guest house first and clean up,” Polly heard herself say; she was surprised how normal her voice sounded.
“Right. You do look kind of as if you’d been rolling around on the floor. But I don’t mind.” Mac hugged her again.
Polly held herself stiff for a moment; then she leaned wholly and passionately into the kiss. You might as well enjoy it, she told herself, almost weeping. You haven’t much time.
Yeah, I wanted to talk to you, like I told Dad. He says you’ve been getting all kinds of bad news about Aunt Laurie, really shitty low-grade stuff. So I wanted to even up the score.
Sure, it’s true she died when I was thirteen. And the last time I saw her I was only eleven and a half. But I remember her just fine. I ought to, because she like changed my life.
What she did was — But you have to understand how it all happened, the whole scene.
Okay, it was Christmas vacation, the last year before my parents split up, and we were all down visiting Granddad and Marcia in New York. It was always kind of uncomfortable there; we didn’t go too often, and we never stayed very long. Half the time they were away somewhere, traveling in Europe or whatever. Granddad was a restless type; well, I dig that, I’m kind of like him.
The way it always seemed to me back then, Dad didn’t have a real family; not like my mother’s folks in Brookline, who’ve lived in the same house for forty years, with all these uncles and aunts and cousins and neighbors around. Kids like their families to stay put, you know; I can see it already in mine, and he’s only three.
Well, Dad’s mother and aunt were down in Florida, and all he had left in New York was his father and Marcia, and his sister, Laurie, who was my half aunt. That always seemed kind of weird to me, you know. There was a family joke that when I was real little I asked Ma, which half of Laurie was my aunt?
I don’t know. I guess I thought it could be the left side of her, or maybe the part above the waist. I mean that wouldn’t have surprised me. Even a little kid could see she wasn’t like other people.
For instance, she wasn’t like any of the other women in my family. She wasn’t really Jewish, only the part that doesn’t count according to Jewish law, and she didn’t know anything about Jewish things. Then she was real thin, not like the rest of us, and she had all this long shiny hair that always looked a little damp. She never said much, and she had a kind of drifty manner, as if she wasn’t even there in the room half the time. If she did notice Celia or me she didn’t talk to us the way most adults talk to kids. I don’t think she knew what a kid was exactly.
Anyhow, we were all there in the apartment that afternoon. It’d started raining hard, and we couldn’t go to the park, so Marcia got out some paper and colored pencils to keep me and Celia occupied while the men watched television and she and Mom made dinner.
You know how kids get typed, one is a jock and the other is a musician, whatever? Well, everybody in my family was good at words except me, so the idea was that because I liked drawing, I might grow up to be an artist like Aunt Laurie. The trouble was, I couldn’t really draw worth a damn, and at eleven I was just finding that out.
I was trying to make a picture of two horses I’d seen trotting in the park that morning, only I couldn’t get them right. I got more and more frustrated, and started jabbing the colored pencils into the paper. It was one of those soft cheap drawing pads they sell in the ten-cent store; it would have been okay for crayons, but Marcia’s pencils were too hard for it. I kept ripping holes in the sheets, then tearing them out, crushing them up, and throwing them around the room. Finally I got so mad I started a fight with my sister.
Aunt Laurie didn’t seem to notice anything much, but while Mom was calming us down she put on her duffel coat and went out without saying a word to anybody. About an hour later she came back, dripping wet, and handed me a plastic shopping bag, and in it, all wrapped up, was this expensive camera, a Leica.
Well, the honest truth is, nobody was much pleased. Mom thought the camera was much too expensive and complicated for an eleven-year-old, and she was right, too. “Oh, Laurie, you shouldn’t have!” That was what she said, and she meant it.
Aunt Laurie told her it was a Christmas present. That didn’t go over very well, because nobody there celebrated Christmas, only Hanukkah. And besides, they all thought, if Aunt Laurie was going to give me a present she should’ve bought something for Celia too. Celia thought so too, naturally, though she didn’t whine about it or anything. But then it wasn’t as if she’d wanted a camera.
I didn’t want one much either. I felt kind of hurt and insulted really. It was as if Aunt Laurie, the family artist, had been watching me and knew I wasn’t any good, not like her, and never would be. So she was sorry for me; and I couldn’t stand that, back then. Hell, I still can’t.
But, you see, she knew somehow. When she saw me trying to draw those horses — to reproduce exactly what I’d seen, not like a painter but like a photographer — she knew what I needed. Only I didn’t understand then. For me it was as if she was saying, You might as well quit right now, baby. I didn’t get any other message, because I didn’t have any respect for photography at eleven; I didn’t know what it was, really.
Yes, after I got home I put in a roll of film, and tried it out, but my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t understand the controls, and the camera was too big for me anyhow; I couldn’t even hold it steady. The pictures came out a mess, and I shoved the whole thing away in a closet.
Well what happened was, a couple of years later, when I was nearly fourteen, Aunt Laurie died; and Dad went down to Key West afterward to sort out her things. He found maybe a dozen photography books, going back years. All the greats; Cartier-Bresson, and Stieglitz, and Bourke-White, and Walker Evans, and collections from the old
Life.
Sometime before she died Aunt Laurie had crossed out her name in all of them and written in mine. “Laura Zimmern,” and later on “Laura Jones” or “Lorin Jones,” was canceled with a long stroke of the pen, and “Ruth Zimmern” was written in underneath, in her fine narrow loopy writing, almost like nineteenth-century calligraphy; you’ve probably seen it.
So Dad sent the books on to me. I’d given up on art by then. The current family idea, and mine too, was that I was going to live on a farm and take care of animals, like my stepfather, Bernie.
Well, those books. They hit me like a bank of flashbulbs going off. I hadn’t realized photographs could be like that, but once I saw them I wanted to do the same. I got out the Leica, and this time I was big enough to hold it steady and understand the directions, and that’s how the whole thing started. I figure if it hadn’t been for Aunt Laurie, I’d be a fat contented country vet somewhere now.
Hell, no. Like Marcia always says, I’ve got no regrets. I just wish I could see Aunt Laurie again somehow and thank her, that’s all.
I
N THE ILL-LIT, HIGH-CEILINGED
hall of a university building, Polly sat on a wooden bench waiting for Leonard Zimmern to join her for lunch. Shufflings and murmurs reached her from the classrooms opposite, and a gust of chill snowy air slapped her face every time the outside doors swung open to admit students in the uncouth dress and weary, wretched expressions characteristic of exam period.
Polly also felt weary and wretched. She hadn’t even started her holiday shopping, and she had another dentist appointment this afternoon with awful Dr. Bebb. Stevie was coming home soon, which was something to look forward to; but according to Jim he was probably going back to Denver for the rest of the school year.
At least she could congratulate herself on having gotten out of Key West in time. It had been a near thing, though. After she changed her ticket, Polly had all but forgotten her project and given herself wholly up to Mac and to pleasure. They had jogged in a drifting fog by the ocean at dawn, swum in the rose-stained waves at sunset, and made love on the sand (romantically but rather grittily) by starlight. They had gone dancing again, bought palm-leaf hats at a flea market, and watched the shrimp boats unload.
They hadn’t been out to the reef, because the sea was still too high; but they’d gone fishing with a friend of Mac’s and brought home a six-pound kingfish that Lee had stuffed and baked for them and two of her guests. For three days Polly had hardly thought of her book, and the only work she had done was to help Mac and his crew tape and spackle sheetrock.
It still scared her to think how close she had come to really caring about Mac — no, she corrected herself, Hugh Cameron — and accepting his version of Lorin Jones. Because of course his story was just as partial and biased a view of Lorin’s life as Jacky’s or Garrett’s. Maybe more so. The trouble was, as Jeanne said, that though she knew all her informants were untrustworthy, whenever she got too close to one of them her vision blurred, and he turned into a sympathetic person; in Mac’s case, to worse than that.
But as Jeanne had pointed out, she had to look at the situation objectively. “Polly, dear. You may have had an exciting time in Florida, well, why not? But you know it would really be a mistake to take it seriously. This is somebody who deceived you, by his own admission; who was cheating on the woman he lives with; and who’s more or less stolen two very valuable paintings. I’m not blaming you. I know all too well how crazy I get sometimes myself when I’m in an erotic blur, so that I simply won’t let myself see what’s quite plain to everyone around me.”
It was plain to Jeanne, for instance, that Polly had been in a vulnerable condition the whole time she was in Key West: confused and credulous — almost as if she’d been under a voodoo spell of the sort that Ron and Phil had warned her about. Once home, though, she had more or less fallen apart.
It was Jeanne who had put her back together; Jeanne had been wonderful. She had sympathized, understood, and vigorously denied that Polly was in any way responsible for what had happened in Key West. It was clear to Jeanne that her friend had been lured into Hugh Cameron’s house, and then practically raped, when she was ill and miserable and exhausted — after all, hadn’t she come home with a streaming cold and a temperature of over a hundred? Hadn’t she had to be put straight to bed, and nursed back to physical and emotional health by her devoted Calico Cat?
What had happened in Key West was also partly, Jeanne had suggested, a side effect of Polly’s long concentration on Lorin Jones: of first a conscious and later and more darkly a subconscious identification with her subject. Finally she had even begun to have Lorin’s experiences: she had been exploited by Lorin’s dealers, for instance. (Jacky, as Jeanne had pointed out, hadn’t offered to go to Key West himself, or contribute to her plane fare, though when the paintings she’d found were retrieved and sold he would get a large commission.) She had been pawed and condescended to by Garrett Jones; she had been deceived and seduced by Mac/Hugh.
And even after Mac/Hugh had, as he put it, “come clean,” he was still dirty, still lying, Jeanne was sure of that. The story about Lorin Jones being addicted to speed, for instance, sounded to her like a parcel of lies; why, even Lorin’s own sister-in-law had never heard anything of the kind. It was clear to Jeanne that Cameron was a dishonest, dangerous person: superficially charming and clever maybe, but warped. Maybe even a borderline psychopath, she had suggested yesterday. “Gee, yeah, that could be,” agreed Betsy, who had been present at these discussions more often than Polly would have liked.